Carcanet online book launch: The Earliest Witnesses by GC Waldrep

American poet and historian, and Professor of English at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, GC Waldrep launches his first UK poetry collection, The Earliest Witnesses, with Manchester’s Carcanet Press. Hosting the reading, and discussing the new work, will be another American poet, and children’s writer, Victoria Chang.

With academic specialisations including Dada and surrealism, Waldrep’s new poems are described as being “at one level, acute observations of the world in its physical and dramatic detail.

GC Waldrep is the author of six full-length collections in the States, most recently feast gently (Tupelo, 2018), winner of the 2019 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. With academic specialisations including Dada and surrealism, Waldrep’s new poems are described as being “at one level, acute observations of the world in its physical and dramatic detail. But eye and ear detect, in what is there, shadows and figures of what is beyond…” Demanding repeated readings, the poems are called “a form of translation that engages not just the surface but the essence of what is seen, what the poet calls ‘eye-proofs of the epiphenomenal world’.”

Waldrep edits the journal West Branch, and his recent work has appeared in journals including American Poetry Review, Poetry, Paris Review, PN Review, New England Review, Yale Review, New American Writing and Conjunctions.

As always, the press will be showing extracts of the text during the reading so that you can read along, and audience members will have the opportunity to ask their own questions. Registration for this online event is £2, redeemable against the cost of the book – attendees will receive a discount code and how to get hold of it during and after the event.